InChI Tag: Search

23 posts

PubChem chemical structure standardization

Abstract

Background:

PubChem is a chemical information repository, consisting of three primary databases: Substance, Compound, and BioAssay. When individual data contributors submit chemical substance descriptions to  substance, the unique chemical structures are extracted and stored into Compound through an automated process called structure standardization. The present study describes the PubChem standardization approaches and analyzes them for their success rates, reasons that cause structures to be  rejected, and modifcations applied to structures during the standardization process. Furthermore, the PubChem standardization is compared to the structure normalization of the IUPAC International Chemical Identifer (InChI) software, as manifested by conversion of the InChI back into a chemical structure.

Chemical Entity Semantic Specification: Knowledge representation for efficient semantic cheminformatics and facile data integration

Abstract

Background:

Over the past several centuries, chemistry has permeated virtually every facet of human lifestyle, enriching fields as diverse as medicine, agriculture, manufacturing, warfare, and electronics, among numerous others. Unfortunately, application-specific, incompatible chemical information formats and representation strategies have emerged as a result of such diverse adoption of chemistry. Although a number of efforts have been dedicated to unifying the computational representation of chemical information, disparities between the various chemical databases still persist and stand in the way of cross-domain, interdisciplinary investigations. Through a common syntax and formal semantics, Semantic Web technology offers the ability to accurately represent, integrate, reason about and query across diverse chemical information.

Results:

Here we specify and implement the Chemical Entity Semantic Specification (CHESS) for the representation of polyatomic chemical entities, their substructures, bonds, atoms, and reactions using Semantic Web technologies. CHESS provides means to capture aspects of their corresponding chemical descriptors, connectivity, functional composition, and geometric structure while specifying mechanisms for data provenance. We demonstrate that using our readily extensible specification, it is possible to efficiently integrate multiple disparate chemical data sources, while retaining appropriate correspondence of chemical descriptors, with very little additional effort. We demonstrate the impact of some of our representational decisions on the performance of chemically-aware knowledgebase searching and rudimentary reaction candidate selection. Finally, we provide access to the tools necessary to carry out chemical entity encoding in CHESS, along with a sample knowledgebase.

Conclusions:

By harnessing the power of Semantic Web technologies with CHESS, it is possible to provide a means of facile cross-domain chemical knowledge integration with full preservation of data correspondence and provenance. Our representation builds on existing cheminformatics technologies and, by the virtue of RDF specification, remains flexible and amenable to application- and domain-specific annotations without compromising chemical data integration. We conclude that the adoption of a consistent and semantically-enabled chemical specification is imperative for surviving the coming chemical data deluge and supporting systems science research.

Open Data, Open Source and Open Standards in chemistry: The Blue Obelisk five years on

Abstract

Background:

The Blue Obelisk movement was established in 2005 as a response to the lack of Open Data, Open Standards and Open Source (ODOSOS) in chemistry. It aims to make it easier to carry out chemistry research by promoting interoperability between chemistry software, encouraging cooperation between Open Source developers, and developing community resources and Open Standards.

Results:

This contribution looks back on the work carried out by the Blue Obelisk in the past 5 years and surveys progress and remaining challenges in the areas of Open Data, Open Standards, and Open Source in chemistry.

Conclusions:

We show that the Blue Obelisk has been very successful in bringing together researchers and developers with common interests in ODOSOS, leading to development of many useful resources freely available to the chemistry community.

International chemical identifier for reactions (RInChI)

Abstract

The Reaction InChI (RInChI) extends the idea of the InChI, which provides a unique descriptor of molecular structures, towards reactions. Prototype versions of the RInChI have been available since 2011. The frst ofcial release (RInChIV1.00), funded by the InChI Trust, is now available for download (https://www.inchi-trust.org/wp/downloads/). This release defnes the format and generates hashed representations (RInChIKeys) suitable for database and web operations. The RInChI provides a concise description of the key data in chemical processes, and facilitates the manipulation and analysis of reaction data.

Comparative evaluation of open source software for mapping between metabolite identifiers in metabolic network reconstructions: application to Recon 2

Abstract

Background:

An important step in the reconstruction of a metabolic network is annotation of metabolites. Metabolites are generally annotated with various database or structure based identifiers. Metabolite annotations in metabolic reconstructions may be incorrect or incomplete and thus need to be updated prior to their use.
Genome-scale metabolic reconstructions generally include hundreds of metabolites. Manually updating annotations is therefore highly laborious. This prompted us to look for open-source software applications that could facilitate automatic updating of annotations by mapping between available metabolite identifiers. We identified three applications developed for the metabolomics and chemical informatics communities as potential solutions. The applications were MetMask, the Chemical Translation System, and UniChem. The first implements a “metabolite masking” strategy for mapping between identifiers whereas the latter two implement different versions of an InChI based strategy. Here we evaluated the suitability of these applications for the task of mapping between metabolite identifiers in genome-scale metabolic reconstructions. We applied the best suited application to updating identifiers in Recon 2, the latest reconstruction of human metabolism.

Results:

All three applications enabled partially automatic updating of metabolite identifiers, but significant manual effort was still required to fully update identifiers. We were able to reduce this manual effort by searching for new identifiers using multiple types of information about metabolites. When multiple types of information were combined, the Chemical Translation System enabled us to update over 3,500 metabolite identifiers in Recon 2. All but approximately 200 identifiers were updated automatically.

Conclusions:

We found that an InChI based application such as the Chemical Translation System was better suited to the task of mapping between metabolite identifiers in genome-scale metabolic reconstructions. We identified several features, however, that could be added to such an application in order to tailor it to this task.

Towards a Universal SMILES representation – A standard method to generate canonical SMILES based on the InChI

Abstract

Background:

There are two line notations of chemical structures that have established themselves in the field: the SMILES string and the InChI string. The InChI aims to provide a unique, or canonical, identifier for chemical structures, while SMILES strings are widely used for storage and interchange of chemical structures, but no standard exists to generate a canonical SMILES string.

Results:

I describe how to use the InChI canonicalisation to derive a canonical SMILES string in a straightforward way, either incorporating the InChI normalisations (Inchified SMILES) or not (Universal SMILES). This is the first description of a method to generate canonical SMILES that takes stereochemistry into account. When tested on the 1.1 m compounds in the ChEMBL database, and a 1 m compound subset of the PubChem Substance database, no canonicalisation failures were found with Inchified SMILES. Using Universal SMILES, 99.79% of the ChEMBL database was canonicalised successfully and 99.77% of the PubChem subset.

Conclusions:

The InChI canonicalisation algorithm can successfully be used as the basis for a common standard for canonical SMILES. While challenges remain – such as the development of a standard aromatic model for SMILES – the ability to create the same SMILES using different toolkits will mean that for the first time it will be possible to easily compare the chemical models used by different toolkits.

Detection of IUPAC and IUPAC-like chemical names

Abstract

Motivation:

Chemical compounds like small signal molecules or other biological active chemical substances are an important entity class in life science publications and patents. Several representations and nomenclatures for chemicals like SMILES, InChI, IUPAC or trivial names exist. Only SMILES and InChI names allow a direct structure search, but in biomedical texts trivial names and Iupac like names are used more frequent. While trivial names can be found with a dictionary-based approach and in such a way mapped to their corresponding structures, it is not possible to enumerate all IUPAC names. In this work, we present a new machine learning approach based on conditional random fields (CRF) to find mentions of IUPAC and IUPAC-like names in scientific text as well as its evaluation and the conversion rate with available name-to-structure tools.

Results:

We present an IUPAC name recognizer with an F1 measure of 85.6% on a MEDLINE corpus. The evaluation of different CRF orders and offset conjunction orders demonstrates the importance of these parameters. An evaluation of hand-selected patent sections containing large enumerations and terms with mixed nomenclature shows a good performance on these cases (F1 measure 81.5%). Remaining recognition problems are to detect correct borders of the typically long terms, especially when occurring in parentheses or enumerations. We demonstrate the scalability of our implementation by providing results from a full MEDLINE run.

Availability:

We plan to publish the corpora, annotation guideline as well as the conditional random field model as a UIMA component.

Contact:[email protected]

yaInChI: Modified InChI string scheme for line notation of chemical structures

A modified InChI (International Chemical Identifier) string scheme, yaInChI (yet another InChI), is suggested as a method for including the structural information of a given molecule, making it straightforward and more easily readable. The yaInChI theme is applicable for checking the structural identity with higher sensitivity and generating three-dimensional (3-D) structures from the one-dimensional (1-D) string with less ambiguity than the general InChI method. The modifications to yaInChI provide non-rotatable single bonds, stereochemistry of organometallic compounds, allene and cumulene, and parity of atoms with a lone pair. Additionally, yaInChI better preserves the original information of the given input file (SDF) using the protonation information, hydrogen count +1, and original bond type, which are not considered or restrictively considered in InChI and SMILES. When yaInChI is used to perform a duplication check on a 3D chemical structure database, Ligand.Info, it shows more discriminating power than InChI. The structural information provided by yaInChI is in a compact format, making it a promising solution for handling large chemical structure databases.

Keywords: line notationduplication checkInChIchemical databaseSMILES

InChI in the wild: an assessment of InChIKey searching in Google

Abstract

While chemical databases can be queried using the InChI string and InChIKey (IK) the latter was designed for open-web searching. It is becoming increasingly effective for this since more sources enhance crawling of their websites by the Googlebot and consequent IK indexing. Searchers who use Google as an adjunct to database access may be less familiar with the advantages of using the IK as explored in this review. As an example, the IK for atorvastatin retrieves ~200 low-redundancy links from a Google search in 0.3 of a second. These include most major databases and a very low false-positive rate. Results encompass less familiar but potentially useful sources and can be extended to isomer capture by using just the skeleton layer of the IK. Google Advanced Search can be used to filter large result sets. Image searching with the IK is also effective and complementary to open-web queries. Results can be particularly useful for less-common structures as exemplified by a major metabolite of atorvastatin giving only three hits. Testing also demonstrated document-to-document and document-to-database joins via structure matching. The necessary generation of an IK from chemical names can be accomplished using open tools and resources for patents, papers, abstracts or other text sources. Active global sharing of local IK-linked information can be accomplished via surfacing in open laboratory notebooks, blogs, Twitter, figshare and other routes. While information-rich chemistry (e.g. approved drugs) can exhibit swamping and redundancy effects, the much smaller IK result sets for link-poor structures become a transformative first-pass option. The IK indexing has therefore turned Google into a de-facto open global chemical information hub by merging links to most significant sources, including over 50 million PubChem and ChemSpider records. The simplicity, specificity and speed of matching make it a useful option for biologists or others less familiar with chemical searching. However, compared to rigorously maintained major databases, users need to be circumspect about the consistency of Google results and provenance of retrieved links. In addition, community engagement may be necessary to ameliorate possible future degradation of utility.

UniChem: extension of InChI-based compound mapping to salt, connectivity and stereochemistry layers

Abstract

UniChem is a low-maintenance, fast and freely available compound identifier mapping service, recently made available on the Internet. Until now, the criterion of molecular equivalence within UniChem has been on the basis of complete identity between Standard InChIs. However, a limitation of this approach is that stereoisomers, isotopes and salts of otherwise identical molecules are not considered as related. Here, we describe how we have exploited the layered structural representation of the Standard InChI to create new functionality within UniChem that integrates these related
molecular forms. The service, called ‘Connectivity Search’ allows molecules to be first matched on the basis of complete identity between the connectivity layer of their corresponding Standard InChIs, and the remaining layers then compared to highlight stereochemical and isotopic differences. Parsing of Standard InChI sub-layers permits mixtures and salts to also be included in this integration process. Implementation of these enhancements required simple modifications to the schema, loader and web application, but none of which have changed the original UniChem functionality or services. The scope of queries may be varied using a variety of easily configurable options, and the output is annotated to assist the user to filter, sort and understand the difference between query and retrieved structures. A RESTful web service output may be easily processed programmatically to allow developers to present the data in whatever form they believe their users will require, or to define their own level of molecular equivalence for their resource, albeit within the constraint of identical connectivity.

QSAR-modeling of toxicity of organometallic compounds by means of the balance of correlations for InChI-based optimal descriptors

Toropov, A. A., Toropova, A. P., & Benfenati, E. (2010). QSAR-modeling of toxicity of organometallic compounds by means of the balance of correlations for InChI-based optimal descriptors. Molecular diversity14(1), 183-192.

This paper present a use of InChI-based molecular descriptors to predict toxicity. Its abstract follows.

“Quantitative structure–activity relationships (QSAR) for toxicity toward rats (pLD50) have been built by means of optimal descriptors. Comparison of the optimal descriptors calculated using the International Chemical Identifier (InChI) with the optimal descriptors calculated using the simplified molecular input line entry system (SMILES) has shown that the InChI-based models give more accurate prediction for the abovementioned toxicity of organometallic compounds. These models were obtained by means of the balance of correlation: one subset of the training set (subtraining set) plays role of the training; the second subset (calibration set) plays role of the preliminary check of the models. It has been shown that the balance of correlations is a more robust predictor for the toxicity than the classic scheme (training set—test set: without the calibration set). Three splits into the subtraining set, calibration set, and test set were examined.”

 

Failures of fractional crystallization: ordered co‐crystals of isomers and near isomers

A list of 270 structures of ordered co‐crystals of isomers, near isomers and molecules that are almost the same has been compiled. Searches for structures containing isomers could be automated by the use of IUPAC International Chemical Identifier (InChI™) strings but searches for co‐crystals of very similar molecules were more labor intensive. Compounds in which the heteromolecular AB interactions are clearly better than the average of the homomolecular AA and BB interactions were excluded. The two largest structural classes found include co‐crystals of configurational diastereomers and of quasienantiomers (or quasiracemates). These two groups overlap. There are 114 co‐crystals of diastereomers and the same number of quasiracemates, with 71 structures being counted in both groups; together the groups account for 157 structures or 58% of the total. The large number of quasiracemates is strong evidence for inversion symmetry being very favorable for crystal packing. Co‐crystallization of two diastereomers is especially likely if a 1,1 switch of a methyl group and an H atom, or of an inversion of a [2.2.1] or [2.2.2] cage, in one of the diastereomers would make the two molecules enantiomers.

Matlab InChIKey Scripts

This is a collection of Matlab scripts for working with InChIKeys: IKextract, IKfreqFH, IKstring, and IKmusic

IKextract, InChIKey Extract, can extract InChIKeys from chemical Structure data files (SDFs). This script was successfully used to extract over 90 million InChIKeys (unique chemical identifiers) from over 5000 PubChem SD files. Users can also extract other data from SDFs by specifying the desired SD tag.

IKfreqFH, InChIKey frequency of first hash block, extracts the first hash block of InChIKeys and sorts them by frequency. Such a method is useful for analyzing the variety of chemical connectivity in large datasets.

IKstring, InChIKey String, allows for searching for strings within InChIKeys. I use it to search the > 90 million InChIKeys in PubChem.

IKmusic, InChIKey music, creates music from InChIKeys. A unique song is created for each InChIKey (i.e. every unique chemical substance has a different song!)

Many InChIs and quite some feat

Comprehensive 2015 article published in Springer’s Journal of Computer-Aided Molecular Design. Here is the abstract,

The IUPAC International Chemical Identifier (InChI) is a non-proprietary, international standard to represent chemical structures. It was conceived 15 years ago, and has been is use for 10 years. The InChI Trust is developing and improving on the current standard, further enabling the interlinking of chemical structures on the web. This mini-review looks at the widespread adoption of InChI in software and databases.